The Health of America.

I was reading today of the legal challenge to Barack Obama’s law requiring all Americans to have health care insurance on pain of legal sanctions. It astonishes me that a so-called Democrat president should want to engender such a gross dilution of personal liberties. I’m also a little bemused as to why the Republicans should object, since it would surely make even more profit for the fat cats in the insurance industry. Maybe an American can explain that one to me. And maybe you can also explain how a poor person who can’t afford health insurance will be able to afford the fine for not having it.

It raises a deeper issue, though. It demonstrates what a gulf there is between British and American attitudes on something as fundamental as health.

I’ve never had health insurance; none of my family ever had it; nobody I’ve lived with ever had it. We don’t need it, because we in Britain have had the National Health Service for sixty three years. It provides free, high quality health care to everybody, and it’s largely paid for out of taxation (it was wholly paid for out of taxation until the gremlin known as Thatcher put a spanner in the works.) The only point in having private health insurance in Britain is to jump the queue, be guaranteed a private room with TV, or maybe get access to the odd, very expensive drug that isn’t on the NHS list. Not much of a reason, really, to give your hard-earned money to the fat cats in the insurance industry.

I gather that America doesn’t want a National Health Service. The point about paying for health provision out of taxation is that the rich pay more than the poor, and that appears to run counter to the American mentality. As I understand it, the root American attitude is ‘Why should I throw some of my wealth into taxation in order to subsidise the health of poor people? Let them fend for themselves.’ (Let them die and decrease the surplus population?) And I suppose it’s a rational point. Whether or not it’s a fair point surely depends on what sort of core consciousness America wants to adhere to – a selfish one, or a more socially inclusive one in which the rich help out the poor.

And why should I be in the least bit troubled about this, as long as I don’t have to live there?